Fractional CFO & Controller Services for Cincinnati Businesses

Cincinnati companies of $3 million to $50 million rarely fail from lack of work. They fail from the distance between the work and the accounting, and the river doubles that distance. An electrical contractor in Blue Ash that picks up a package in Covington now files in two states, tracks two sets of lien deadlines, and answers to a Kentucky licensing board it had never heard of. A distributor in Fairfield that opens a branch in Erlanger discovers that its bookkeeper has been recording Kentucky sales in the Ohio entity since March. The QuickBooks file was fine at $5 million. At $12 million with two states it is a rumor.

The symptoms repeat across the metro. Receivables age past 60 days while the line covers payroll. Job margins that looked fine at bid vanish at closeout because change orders were performed and never billed. The bank asks for a covenant certificate and a WIP schedule and receives a promise. The controller left in February for a hospital system, and the search is still open. Meanwhile the owner is bidding the next hospital package because everyone else is, without knowing whether the last one made money.

The fix follows a sequence. Assess what is actually true about cash, margin, and debt. Clean up the ledger so the numbers can be believed, one entity and one state at a time. Stabilize the weekly cash cycle and the monthly close. Document the process so it survives without us. Then transition it to your team or a full-time hire when the company can support one. That sequence, Assess, Clean up, Stabilize, Document, Transition, is how a $6 million company in Mason becomes an $18 million company without the accounting department becoming the reason it stalls.

Our clients are privately held companies between roughly $3 million and $50 million in revenue, owned by the people who run them. In Greater Cincinnati that means general contractors in West Chester and Mason building the industrial and multifamily projects that follow the population north along I-75, HVAC contractors, electrical contractors, and plumbing contractors working hospital, university, and logistics jobs on both sides of the river, site and concrete subs staged for the bridge corridor, building-materials yards and distributors in Hamilton and Fairfield, the tier-two suppliers feeding the aerospace plant in Evendale, and the home-services and professional-services firms that serve a metro spread across three states.

The situations repeat. The owner still signs every check and reads cash from the bank app. Revenue crossed the river and the accounting did not follow. A surety has capped the program because the financial statements are prepared on a cash basis. A general contractor requires monthly financials from its subcontractors, and the company has never produced one on time. A partner buyout is 18 months out, and the books would not survive diligence. Or cash is short in a company that is profitable on paper, because the profit is sitting in retainage on two hospital jobs.

You should hire someone else if you need bookkeeping alone, tax preparation, an audit opinion, or legal advice. We coordinate with the people who do those things and we stay in our lane. And if your plan is to hire a full-time CFO to fix books that a good fractional controller could fix in a quarter, we will say so on the first call, at no charge.

A fractional CFO gives you the judgment of a chief financial officer for a fraction of the week and a fraction of the cost. In Cincinnati that judgment goes to questions the two-state metro forces on every growing company. Can a $10 million mechanical contractor fund 90 days of labor and material on a hospital package before the first draw, and what does that do to the line? Which entity should hold the Kentucky work, and what does that mean for Ohio's commercial activity tax, which applies at 0.26 percent to taxable gross receipts above a $6 million exclusion for 2025 and 2026? What happens to the forecast when the bridge corridor pulls the metro's best crews?

We do not decide the tax position. We put it in the forecast and get your CPA in the room before the first invoice goes out. The working tools are a 13-week cash forecast updated every Monday, a monthly package with margin by job and by customer, a lender relationship that is managed rather than endured, and a bid discipline that checks working capital before the estimate leaves the building. The national overview of our fractional CFO service covers the full scope. This page is about how it works between Hamilton and Florence.

Fractional CFO engagements start at $3,500 per month. CFO Advisory starts at $5,000, Operating CFO at $8,500, Embedded CFO at $12,500, and interim leadership is custom. Those are starting points, not quotes. Final pricing reflects company size, entity count, transaction volume, the condition of the books, urgency, and what the bank and surety are asking for. Travel to Cincinnati is scoped in the engagement letter, and one-time cleanup and software are separate unless expressly included.

A controller's job is to make the numbers true and on time. Ours close the month within 10 business days, maintain a job-cost ledger that ties to the general ledger, produce a WIP schedule the surety can read, run receivables and payables on a calendar instead of a mood, and reconcile every bank, loan, and credit-card account monthly. For a two-state contractor that includes entity-level books that stand on their own, retainage tracked by job and by state, and the percentage-of-completion adjustments that turn a cash-basis guess into a real margin.

In Cincinnati the hard part is not the work. It is finding someone who can do it when the hospital systems, the consumer-products and grocery headquarters, the aerospace plant, and the large general contractors all hire from the same pool of construction and cost accountants, and a $12 million sub cannot outbid them for long. A fractional controller solves that by running the function and documenting it, so the next hire inherits a close calendar and a process rather than a mystery. We work in QuickBooks, Sage 300 CRE, ServiceTitan, JD Edwards, and Power BI, which covers most of what is installed between Loveland and Erlanger.

Controller engagements start at $2,500 per month. The scope is written on day one, the close calendar is published, and the deliverables are the same every month: financial statements by entity and consolidated, job-cost reports, WIP, aging, and a cash position you can read in five minutes. When the company is ready for a full-time controller, the documented process goes with the job. Fix it. Run it. Document it. Hand it off.

Neither Ohio nor Kentucky issues a state general contractor license. Ohio's Construction Industry Licensing Board licenses the electrical, HVAC, and plumbing trades for commercial work, and general contracting is registered city by city. Kentucky's Department of Housing, Buildings and Construction licenses HVAC, electrical, and plumbing contractors statewide, and Northern Kentucky cities layer their own registrations on top. A contractor working both banks of the river carries two trade licenses and two renewal calendars. None of that sets bonding capacity. A surety does, on the strength of a WIP schedule that reconciles and working capital that is real. We build that package and keep it current.

The lien calendars do not match either. In Ohio a subcontractor on a commercial project generally must serve a notice of furnishing within 21 days of first providing labor or materials, or within 21 days of the owner's notice of commencement, and the lien affidavit is due within 75 days of last furnishing on commercial work and 60 days on residential. Kentucky requires no preliminary notice, but a subcontractor without a contract with the owner generally must send a written notice to the owner within 120 days of last furnishing and file the lien within six months. We put the calendar in each job setup and track the deadlines on every aging report. Whether to file is your attorney's call.

The tax lines differ too. Ohio's commercial activity tax is measured on gross receipts, not profit, and a contractor that crosses the $6 million exclusion mid-year owes tax on the receipts above it whether or not the jobs were profitable. Kentucky has its own entity-level and local occupational taxes, and Ohio municipal earnings taxes follow where the work is performed. We keep the schedules, forecast the crossings, and make sure the ledger captures what the CPA needs to file in both states. We do not give tax advice. We make sure it is in the bid.

Trouble in Cincinnati arrives from success as often as from failure. A contractor takes a hospital package and a logistics package at once, funds both mobilizations from the line, and discovers in month four that one general contractor's pay-application review takes 45 days and the other holds 10 percent retainage until commissioning. The line is fully drawn. Payroll taxes slip a quarter, in one state or both. A supplier in Hamilton moves the account to COD. By the time the bank calls, the owner has been funding payroll from a home equity line for five months and calling it a bridge.

We start with a 13-week cash-flow forecast built from actual receivables, actual payables, and actual payroll, by entity. Then vendor triage: who gets paid, when, and what they are told. Then a lender conversation with a plan attached, because banks extend patience to borrowers who show up with numbers. The principal has led finance through a Chapter 11 process, including debtor-in-possession operations and court-required reporting, so nothing on the list will be the first time. Our turnaround CFO and 13-week cash-flow forecast pages cover the mechanics.

The other Cincinnati turnaround is the branch that never made money. A distributor or a home-services company opens in Northern Kentucky to follow the customers, staffs it like the Ohio operation, and never separates the numbers well enough to see that the new location has been losing $30,000 a month for two years. That company needs entity-level and branch-level margin, an honest look at which crews and which trucks the branch can carry, and a cash forecast with a scenario in which the branch closes. Either way, it is better to find out in a spreadsheet.

Two states is the first challenge, and it reaches every line of the ledger. Payroll withholding, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, sales and use tax on materials, contractor licensing, lien law, and entity-level taxes all change at the middle of the river. A company that treats Kentucky work as an extension of the Ohio books will get the margin wrong, the tax wrong, or both. We set up the ledger so each state and each entity stands on its own, then consolidate for the owner and the bank.

The second challenge is the labor market the megaproject creates. Six million labor hours on the bridge corridor over roughly seven years, a peak workforce near 1,000, and the trades needed for hospital, aerospace, and logistics work at the same time mean wages and crew availability will move against a $10 million sub for the rest of the decade. The bid you priced in January will not survive July unless someone modeled the wage curve. We build labor-burden and crew-availability assumptions into the forecast and into the estimate review, so growth in backlog comes with the working capital it actually requires.

The third challenge is the calendar. Winter in the Ohio Valley shortens the outdoor season, pushes site and concrete work into a nine-month window, and turns January and February into the months when HVAC service revenue is high but construction billing is thin. The cash cycle follows the weather, and a line of credit sized for June will not carry a company through March. We model the seasonal curve by trade, size the line to the trough, and schedule the pre-season equipment and inventory buys so the company can afford them before the season pays for them.

• Entity-level and state-level books for companies working both sides of the river
• Ohio notice of furnishing at 21 days and Kentucky notice to owner at 120 days tracked from job setup
• Commercial activity tax exposure forecast against the $6 million exclusion with the CPA
• Wage and crew-availability curves priced into bids while the bridge corridor absorbs labor
• Seasonal cash cycles smoothed with a line sized to the winter trough, not the summer peak
• Surety and general-contractor prequalification supported by monthly financials and a reconciled WIP
• Competition for construction accounting talent answered with a documented, transferable process